Blockchain incubator and accelerator Bluehill has officially launched after raising $50 million to support blockchain innovations within the IOST ecosystem.

IOST is a project that aims to build a secure and scalable blockchain for smart services. The project wants to be the choice platform for decentralized apps by attracting developers to its platform. It aims at ‘turbocharging’ sharding by making the shards sufficiently large and strongly bias-resistant via a combination of a client-server randomness scavenging mechanism and leader election via cryptographic sortition.

Bluehill was established to support the growing interest from developers and entrepreneurs in the IOST blockchain. It aims to provide crucial backing for IOST industry partnerships, as well as for projects built within the IOST ecosystem. The goal is to position the IOST network to compete for developer attention with top tier blockchain platforms like ethereum.

Bluehill, which has a team of over 50 full time staff with plans to reach 100 employees by the end of the year, will support blockchain projects by providing services including funding, operations, marketing, HR, recruitment, advisorship and industry partners. In the future, Bluehill and IOST plan to launch projects in order to emulate the rapid expansion of blockchain technology supported by the ethereum ecosystem.

Bluehill has already invested in seven projects that are developing blockchain solutions for cybersecurity, payment processing and content distribution. Among them, two are built on the IOST blockchain while the others are not necessarily committed to a single blockchain protocol.

Bluehill is now accepting applications from startups on a rolling basis and intends to allocate an average of $500,000 per project, including “both seed investments of $100,000 and follow-on investments in the low millions.”

“We’ve seen an upswell of interest from blockchain ecosystem developers looking to partner with the IOST network as well as from DApp teams looking to develop on top of it,” said Bluehill CEO Samantha Wang. “We will be creating a highly supportive ecosystem to accelerate the most promising projects and strengthen the entire IOST network.”